Hello and welcome. You're watching The Global Dialogue. I'm Shireen Bhan. Capgemini is marking 26 years in India. Its journey began in 2000 with the acquisition of Evalueserve's consulting arm when the India operation had just 200 people. Today, that number stands at well over 200,000 employees, with India accounting for over half of its global workforce. Its scale-up has also been supercharged by last year's $3.3 billion acquisition of WNS, the Indian-origin business process management major. The deal added more than 60,000 people and positioned Capgemini as a leader in AI and AI-powered intelligent operations. That integration is now starting to feed into the group's AI-led transformation pipeline. The momentum is reflected in the numbers. Capgemini reported 12.1 billion euros in revenue in the first half of 2026, up 8.8% year-on-year, while constant currency revenue growth came in at 11.3%. The company has since raised its full-year 2026 revenue growth guidance to between 8.5 to 9% from the earlier 6.5 to 8.5%.
At the same time, Capgemini is undertaking a significant internal reset. It announced a Fit for Growth initiative in February this year to realign skills, workforce, and costs for an AI-driven market. So, as Capgemini looks to turn the AI boom into sustained growth, how does India fit into that strategy? And how much of the next phase of growth will be driven by AI and the company's own transformation? Joining us now to talk about all that and more is Aiman Ezzat, the Chief Executive Officer at Capgemini. Aiman, thanks very much for joining us here on CNBC-TV18 on The Global Dialogue. It's good to see you here in India.
Thank you. Thank you for having me. You know, I come to India quite frequently. As I said, I stopped counting after 100 trips.
Well, 101 perhaps or perhaps even more. We don't know since you're not keeping count. But Aiman, let's talk about the importance of India for Capgemini. As I pointed out, year 26 for you. It is the largest base for Capgemini in terms of headcount today. As you talk about an AI-driven transformation for Capgemini, what will be the role, relevance, and significance of India for you?
Well, let's start with India. As you said, we have been in India now for 26 years. Now, I do remember coming to India in 2005 to drive what at the time we called India 10,000, which was how to take India from 2,500 employees to 10,000 employees. And that was 2005. Today, we have over 230,000 employees in India. You know, it's 60% of my workforce. I have many Indian or Indian-born senior executives in my management team. India is part of Capgemini. India is part of the makeup of Capgemini, the delivery of Capgemini, the strategy of Capgemini. So, when I come to India, I feel home. As I said, after 100 trips, many of my employees are there, many of my friends are there. So, it's always a pleasure to come. As part of that, everybody in the group works with India. Everybody in the group—whether you're the CHRO of the group, you're the CFO of the group, you're the head of sales of the group, you're managing any of the businesses—you are an integral part working with India. So, India is at the center of all what we do in Capgemini.
Well, India feels like home. That's wonderful to hear from you, Aiman. But let's try and put some numbers to the India story. You told us what the employee headcount looks like at this point in time—230,000 employees for you. India is at the center of your strategy. What does that mean from an AI standpoint? You do have a new CEO, Srinivas Chand, who is going to be in place. What is the mandate now for the India team? What are the priorities going to be in your 26th year here?
Yeah, so India is part of our large talent pool, and I think it's quite important to see the evolution of India. It has started very much as augmenting our talent pool, being able to help us drive our cost down and improve our productivity. But bit by bit, India has become an integral part of our innovation journey, of our client management journey, of all our industrialization journey. We had over 1,800 client visits to India last year, so that shows the exposure that India has to our clients. And the mandate of India is how to help shift to value. More and more now, what we have to focus on is how the work we do for our client is directly tied to tangible economic benefits versus the client asking us to deploy technology or helping manage a technology environment. Today, we have to make the link between the work we do—whether it's technology, engineering, operations—and how it's impacting the client's value in terms of profitability, speed to market, innovation, you know, tangible, measurable business value. And India is part of that. So the big initiative being driven today by Sanjeev, our India CEO, is called shift to value, okay? And it's really starting account by account to see how more and more we get the team to shift in terms of thinking about how first to think about the value for client before they think about deploying technology and technology excellence.
I want to understand from you how much of what you're currently offering has already started to move to outcome-based pricing. What is the deflationary impact going to be? We're already seeing a fair degree of pricing pressure. How much more do you anticipate? And what kind of pressure do you expect that to put on margins going forward?
So first, the shift we have, we have to explain what we mean by outcome-based value or outcome-based pricing. Definitely what has been happening is that we have moved more and more from time and material, and I'd say probably going three years ago, we were probably at something like 50% time and material in terms of business. When I look at our sales last year, it was down to 35%. And if I follow probably what will happen this year, it will be further down. It won't go down to zero, but the pure time and material part of the business is probably going to end up maybe being 20% of the business to 25%, no more. So the shift is more to fixed price—so to commitment-based. I commit to the client that I'll get some work done for a certain price. Now, we have started to introduce other measures beyond fixed price, complementing with, for example, some upside linked to some metrics—for example, working capital reduction. If in addition to delivering certain things for a fixed price, we are able to impact working capital by a certain measure, then there is a certain upside for doing that. The pure outcome-based pricing models are still very limited, and we are careful about it because if I'm going to commit to a pure outcome-based, I have to make sure that I have all the levers to be able to deliver the outcome, and that's the discussion we have with clients. On the pricing pressure, it's a competitive market. Clients are also anticipating benefits from AI, so yes, we feel some of that pressure. And it's normal, but it's also pushing us to move very fast in terms of how we can deliver better, how we can leverage AI more efficiently, and how to make it real in terms of really delivering cost savings to our clients. And the fact that we're moving to fixed price, I think it's great. I prefer to have a fixed price deal than to basically have negotiation regarding rate card person-by-person. I think it's better to commit to a fixed price, for example, and outcome-based, and then I have the levers in my hand to be able to see how I can deliver better profitability out of that.
It's interesting that you're saying you're focusing on moving more towards fixed price contracts as opposed to time and material or even outcome-based pricing, which you believe at this point in time is a very small part of the business. We've started to see some companies give out specific AI contribution revenue lines. NASSCOM, the industry body here in India, has also put out an estimate. Is that something that you would like to do, to differentiate between how much of the revenue is being driven purely by AI for Capgemini today?
No, we say so. The question is, what do you measure? So it's a bit of a tricky question. What we don't want is to have a number not explaining what's behind the number. So we had started giving a number on bookings, AI-driven bookings, but what does that mean? Most of the work I do today, more and more, has AI embedded in it. I cannot commit to some of what the clients are asking me for without thinking that they will have to embed AI as part of my delivery. Is that considered as being AI work? Or is AI work only work where I am helping the client transform and deploy agents into his environment? So if you don't have a definition, you can throw any number behind it. And I think this is a bit where we stopped putting a number out, and we're thinking carefully about what should be measured, because without a definition, it's meaningless. But we consider that we absolutely should start putting a number out. I think it's important that our investors start to understand how much of our business is shifting towards AI, where we are in that transition. So it's something we want to do, we will do, but coming with a definite, clear definition about what it means and what we are measuring.
That is an important point, and I think a lot of people appreciate or will appreciate what you're saying on how do you actually quantify or define what is being measured or counted as AI. You said that you're not disclosing it today or you stopped reporting it today, but you will eventually move towards that. A, how soon can we expect you to do that? And B, what do you think should be measured that would then credibly quantify what constitutes AI-driven revenue?
So it's a bit of a challenge. It's work in progress for us. But we define value pools. So we define value pools. I'm talking, for example, about the fact that we have five value pools that are going to drive this shift towards AI. We talked about tech modernization, and this is leveraging AI of course. We talk about setting up control planes. We talk about all the new tech stack, building the new tech stack with semantic and context layers, with the LLM and API layer, the agentic layer, etc. We talked about all the evolution of products and services leveraging AI and the evolution of processes leveraging AI. So some of these will have to fall in there as we start measuring them. So I think we can credibly start thinking about, going into next year, start putting some numbers around some of the value pools, but not necessarily individually, but overall how much we are doing around the value pools that we have defined as being the major drivers of our transition towards AI.
